The work of Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) is profoundly personal and politically charged work delivers a dynamic materiality to the canons of painting, serving as much as a diaristic account of her own biography as a means to interrogate broader issues of social justice. With a practice spanning over five decades and encompassing a diverse range of mediums, including painting, collage, drawing and film, Pindell lends visceral form to a rigorous intellectual inquiry of the given subject.
In the late 1960s, Pindell embarked on her seminal series of abstract Untitled paintings – a career-long endeavour in which the motif is atomised and accrued, rendered as stipples of light and colour that evoke interstellar infinities. In the early 1970s, the artist began a pivotal series of Spray Dot paintings. Pindell began spraying paint onto large canvases through hole-punched cardstock templates, subtly varying the color with each pass. The layers of vibrant dots resulted in an elaborate, sensuous interplay between background and foreground with endless fluctuations of color and light. These early paintings served as progenitors of much of her abstract work to follow: presciently, the artist saved the punched paper dots and, years later, began incorporating them into her work.
Pindell’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, United States); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, United States); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, United States); the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC, United States); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, United States); the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, United States); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, United States); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, United States).